The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.
Syukuro Manabe born in 1931 in Shinritsu Village, Uma District of Japan. Both his grandfather and his father were physicians, who operated the only clinic in the village. He took a BA degree in 1953, an MA degree in 1955, and a DSc degree in 1959, all from the University of Tokyo although his family expected him to study medicine. After finishing his doctorate, he went to the USA to work at the General Circulation Research Section of the U.S. Weather Bureau, now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA, till 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he worked at the Frontier Research System for Global Change in Japan serving as Director of the Global Warming Research Division. In 2002 he returned to the United States as a visiting research collaborator at the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, Princeton University. He currently serves as senior meteorologist at the university.
Klaus Hasselmann was born in Hamburg, Germany . His father Erwin Hasselmann was an economist, journalist and publisher. Due to his father's activity in the Social Democratic Party in Germany, the family emigrated to the U.K. in mid 1934 at the beginning of the Nazi era to escape the repressive regime and persecution of social democrats, and He grew up in the U.K. from age two. He attended Elementary and Grammar School in Welwyn Garden City, and passed his A-levels (Cambridge Higher School Certificate) in 1949. His parents returned to Hamburg in 1948, but Klaus remained in England to finish his A-levels. In August 1949, at the age of nearly eighteen, he came back to Hamburg in the then divided Germany in order to attend higher education. After attending a practical course in mechanical engineering from 1949 to 1950, he enrolled at the University of Hamburg in 1950 to study physics and mathematics.
Giorgio Parisi was born in 1948 in Italy. He received his degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970 under the supervision of Nicola Cabibbo. He was a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati from 1971 to 1981 and a visiting scientist at the Columbia University from 1973 to 1974, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1976 to 1977, and École Normale Supérieure from 1977 to 1978. From 1981 until 1992 he was a full professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and he is now professor of Quantum Theories at the Sapienza University of Rome. From 2018 until 2021 he was the president of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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